Results tagged “google” from Appleseed Blog

Something unexpected I just learned: to many, it's now considered best-practice to use hyphens ( - ) instead of underscores ( _ ) when separating words in URLs. For example, instead of this:

http://example.com/fun_stuff/my_cats.html

You'd be better off doing this:

http://example.com/fun-stuff/my-cats.html

Why? Simple: Google recommends it. According to Matt Cutts, the big G will do a better job recognizing and indexing the words in your URL if you separate them with hyphens.

This has everything to do with search engine optimization (SEO), a term I tend to shy away from, what with its coming from the sinister realm of marketing versus the practical software architecture tack that I try to stick with. Sometimes the paths cross unexpectedly, though.

For me, this happened most recently as I set up a new Movable Type (4.23) instance for a client. I was surprised to find that, by default, it enforced that all files it created use dashes in their names instead of underscores. Googling on this topic led me to discussions from people asking how to get MT to use dashes in its filenames instead of underscores - the exact opposite of what I sought, but I was intrigued that so many should care. A little more searching led to this post on Google Inside, as well as the articles I linked to above.

I always approach the notion of work-pattern changes due to Google Fiat with a bit of skepticism, but this one's apparently settled into place globally over the last few years without my really noticing. Interesting, anyway.

Having apparently mislaid my print copy, I was surprised and delighted to just now find that Google Books has the full text of many pages from Damian Conway's Perl Best Practices online. Edit: Gah, I just realized that it's not the full text; many pages are arbitrarily withheld, and marked as such. My praise for the book still stands, however.

Those who have worked with me over the last couple of years have been subjected to my occasionally holding up this book as improving the way I wrote software faster and more profoundly than any other single influence. It not only made me a better Perl hacker, but changed the way I approach any software project, regardless of the programming languages it may happen to use. I cannot recommend this book strongly enough to my fellow professional Perl people, and suggest that even those who primarily work in other languages have a look.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some well-documented and robustly tested exception objects to throw...

Dynamic web ads, such as those served up by Google's ubiquitous AdSense platform, are a great way to earn passive revenue from your online presence or publications. However, these ads can bite you in surprising ways if you're not very selective about which pages they appear on, and where on those pages they go. At worst, they can not only confuse your users, but potentially result in a direct loss of traffic or business to competitors.

Click on the thumbnail of this image to see a full-size screenshot of a browser window I recently found myself looking at. I came to this website wanting to download the latest version of TortoiseSVN, a most excellent Subversion client for Windows. When I clicked the "Download" link from the site's front page, I saw this page. What do you suppose I clicked on next?

That's right - I saw "Download - Subversion Client", thought "Yep, that's what I came here for," and clicked the link without reading any further. I was then unpleasantly surprised to find myself at the top of a completely different website. I had unwittingly clicked on an ad that, due to the page's layout, looked like it was part of the page's body text! As a result, I'd been whisked away to the homepage of Syncro, one of TortoiseSVN's competing products.

A more subtle error here is the choice to use AdSense ads on this page at all. Because AdSense works by scanning the containing page's content and then choosing ads that seem relevant, a page with lots of mentions of Subversion clients is naturally going to result in ads for various Subversion software - almost all of which are guaranteed to be for products other than the one the page itself is hoping you'll download!

I myself make use of AdSense on other blogs that I publish; for example, The Gameshelf features a block of ads on every page. They're usually about games, or even other game publications, but since I'm not selling a product on the site I'm not worried about losing any customers to them. On the Appleseed blog that you're currently reading, however, I know that AdSense would see all the text about software consulting that decorates every page on this site, and would happily coax you to visit the websites of my many competitors.

Context-sensitive advertising is a clever invention that increases the chance that ads shown to your site's visitors will be more relevant to their interests, making it more likely they'll click through, and therefore send a little extra revenue your way. And that's quite nice - so long as you have an idea where those click-throughs are aimed.